Clare O'Gara

Clare studies what people make and do with and through digital technologies. Their work broadly explores how power contours the conditions and cultural objects by which human beings appear, fail to appear, and appear unevenly across and beyond cyberspace. Clare foregrounds a vision of media literacy that extends critical attention to texts, performances, embodiments, and subjectivities historically dismissed as frivolous and artless.

Additional Research Interests: micro-celebrity, social media entertainment, and the influencer industry; platform and interface studies; alternative internet histories; queer and trans identity, theory, and culture; sports and fitness media.

clareogara.com

Education

• M.A. — University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2024 — Communication Arts, Media and Cultural Studies
• B.A. — Smith College, 2022 — English, Film and Media Studies, Poetry
  • Honors Thesis: “Camera-Penned, User-Generated: Searching for Self in YouTube Video Essays”

Teaching Appointments

• DesignLab Consultant, Fall 2025
• CA250 Survey of Contemporary Media, 2024-2025
• CA359 Sports Media, Spring 2024
• CA100 Introduction to Speech Composition, Fall 2023
• CA155 Introduction to Digital Media Production, 2022-2023

Publications

• O’Gara, C. (2024, September 1). “’This Is Not a Performance’: Coming-Out Videos, LGBTQ+ Microcelebrity, and the Tenuous Rise of New Queer YouTube.” Camera Obscura. (39:116) pp. 189–218. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11207867
• O’Gara, C. (2024, Spring). “Snackable, Spreadable, User-Generated Spectacles: Theorizing a “Dream Marriage” Between Sports and Digital Media.” Journal of Sports Media. (19:1). pp. 1-25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jsm.2024.a970124

Service

• Graduate Student Organization Representative, 2023-2024
• Sight & Sound (BFI)
  • Invited Voter, “The Best Video Essays of 2024“
  • Invited Voter, “The Best Video Essays of 2023“
• Velvet Light Trap
  • UT Press Liaison, #96 (Continuity and Change in Media Representation), 2024-2025
  • Editorial Board Member, since 2022